Personal Laser Printer

[Mark]

Hello- I need a recomendation for a personal laser printer. Here's what I
need:

1. Parallel port
2. Non-GDI- I need to connect this printer to some industrial equipment that
has a proprietary operating system -PCL 4 would be nice- But I at least need
the ability to dump ASCII text to the parallel port.
3. Inexpensive- I need quite a few of these, so I would like to keep the
initial costs below $200.
4. B&W

I had been buying Brother HL-1440 (I have about 60 of them), but they are
being discontinued. The replacement uses a different cartridge, so that I
thought this would be a good opportunity to see if anything else was out
there.

Thanks,

Mark

 

[Al Dykes]

Hello- I need a recomendation for a personal laser printer. Here's what I
need:

1. Parallel port
2. Non-GDI- I need to connect this printer to some industrial equipment that
has a proprietary operating system -PCL 4 would be nice- But I at least need
the ability to dump ASCII text to the parallel port.
3. Inexpensive- I need quite a few of these, so I would like to keep the
initial costs below $200.
4. B&W

I had been buying Brother HL-1440 (I have about 60 of them), but they are
being discontinued. The replacement uses a different cartridge, so that I
thought this would be a good opportunity to see if anything else was out
there.

Thanks,

Mark

The low-end samsung lasers as of a year ago have been good to me and
ISTR that the CDrom that came with it had Linux software on it, which
is a good indication that they are not GDI printers. Depending on the
model they may be USB-only.

 

[Art]

If you are getting good service from Brother, why not stick with them. I
replaced my old Brother 4550 with a newer model 6800 and it is way improved
and about half the price. On the other hand I know lots of people who are
unhappy with the quality of the latest HP low end lasers.

 

[Mark]

If you are getting good service from Brother, why not stick with them. I
replaced my old Brother 4550 with a newer model 6800 and it is way improved
and about half the price. On the other hand I know lots of people who are
unhappy with the quality of the latest HP low end lasers.

After an extensive search, I only found one printer with the above
characteristics. It turned out to be a Brother 5140. It seems that laser
printers are going the way inkjets did, just a few years ago, eliminating
the parallel port and using the windows GDI for printing. When this printer
gets discontinued, I may forced back to impact (dot matrix), where real
drivers and parallel ports are still the norm.

thanks to everyone who replied.

Mark